Bharti Airtel, Vodafone India, Idea Cellular, Aircel and Telenor are extensively focusing on social engagements over Facebook and Twitter to improve consumer experience, resolve grievances and create a strong brand engagement to stay abreast in the country’s hypercompetitive telecom landscape.

Top telecom service carriers are strategically using data analytics and web-crawling tools to better understand customer behaviour and engage in a two-way social conversation to create tailored products by bringing social media escalations at core to their customer care operations.

This assumes all the more importance as new rival Reliance Jio Infocomm gets set to enter the market on Monday, September 5, with disruptive pricing designed to take away users from incumbents.

India’s largest telco Bharti Airtel has a dedicated in-house social media command centre in Gurgaon while No 2 operator Vodafone India feels that a timely grievance redressal over social network would lead to a positive impact on other consumers.

“Social media strategy is crucial for any brand and being a pioneer, we do it differently across Facebook, Twitter and Instagram platforms,” Bharti Airtel’s chief brand officer Rajiv Mathrani told ET.

The Sunil Mittal-led telco believes that social engagements allows the company to stay closer to the ground and helps to draw a future roadmap for launching new products.

“By using social media insights, we have been able to optimise our interactions and move beyond responding to truly engaging customers,” Mathrani said, adding that the telco attempts a near real-time solution on issues that impact consumer sentiment.

Consultancy firm TNS in its finding said social media is becoming an intrinsic part as 94% of connected consumers in India use social networks and switch between Facebook, Twitter and Google+ as the top three social channels. Vodafone India too feels that social channels provide insights into subscribers’ conversation that helps it to improve its service delivery.

“As an approach, we take all grievances seriously. If there has been a genuine service failure, we redress the situation immediately and take necessary process-level course corrections,” said Laxmi Rajan, national head-customer experience and operations at Vodafone India.

As it swiftly acts to resolve customers’ issues on social platforms, the UK-based telco, however, sees social media escalations as critical and said it generates a positive ruboff on others. Bharti Airtel had 25.68 crore and Vodafone India had 19.97 crore subscribers as of July this year, according to data released by telecom group Cellular Operators Association of India.

Aditya Birla group’s Idea Cellular said the company is using data analytics and web-crawling tools to monitor customers 24x7 and provide quick resolution to their service requests.

“Social media is an instantaneous medium where customers seek quick response. We have set up a dedicated back office team to manage social media escalations,” said a spokesperson for India’s third-largest telecom service company Idea Cellular. The company added that its social media CRM and customer engagement strategy has helped it achieve higher levels of customer satisfaction. Aditya Birla group-owned Idea Cellular serves 17.64 crore consumers today.

“The social conversations help us understand consumers better, which when coupled with other market insights help us package right products and services to offer maximum customer delight,” said Vipul Saurabh, national head-operations & customer support, Aircel.

Saurabh added that the telco deploys a recommendation engine based on customers’ profiles and usage trends, which it further aligns with the retailers and call centre agents so that the communication becomes consistent across the channels.